Honor roll:Costa Book Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Costa Book Award for Poetry. They are ranked by honors received.
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Corpus—Michael Symmons Roberts’ ambitious and inventive fourth collection—centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds—life and after-life, death and resurrection—encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in “Choreography”) and science (“Mapping the Genome”), these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the body:
So the martyrs took the lamb.Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of death—from putrefaction to purification—and life—drought and flood, hunger and satiation—the poems in Corpus speak most movingly of “living the half-life between two elements”, of what it is to be unique and luminously alive.
It tasted rich, steeped in essence
Of anchovy. They picked it clean
And found within, a goose, its pink
Beak in the lamb’s mouth like a tongue.
Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter—tribal violence and subsequent retribution—that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined.
Tom has returned to his family’s farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land—attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives—the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as “Britain’s Gulag”. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence…
Jean Sprackland’s third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way—all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped.
These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach (‘dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic’) or ‘the fund of life’ in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet ‘waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match’ but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they’ve inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat—for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.
Letter to Patience is a book-length poem in iambic pentameter, set in “Patience’s Parlour” a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria in 1993—a time of political unrest.The writer of the letter has returned to Britain, with his Nigerian wife and children, to nurse his dying father.
He writes to Patience, the bar’s owner, a woman in her 30s who once lectured in politics at Ahmadu Bello University, across the main road from her bar. She gave up her job partly because of junta pressures on radical academics.The town is volatile—the bar was attacked by the so-called Ayatollahs and would have been burnt had it not backed onto the property of her Hausa landlord.
There are also thoughtful and elegant digressions thrown up by the multiple narratives. The book is not merely biography or an essay on colonialism and post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and one man’s search for meaning in difficult times.
Cold Calls: Volume 5 of Logue's Homer
Helen, the world’s most beautiful woman, the wife of Lord Menelaos of Sparta, left Greece in the company of Paris, the son of Priam, King of Troy. To repossess her, a thousand Greek ships sailed to Troy. Nine years have passed. The Greeks have not achieved their aim. Indeed, after a quarrel between Achilles their leader and Agamemnon their king, the Trojans, led by Paris’s brother, Prince Hector, have driven the Greeks off the plain of Troy and back behind the palisade protecting their ships. Achilles refuses to help them. It is night…
The scene is set for Cold Calls, the fifth and penultimate instalment of Logue’s Homer, an ongoing project—a piece of performance-art for the page rather than the stage—which has taken several decades to unfold, and has been described by Derek Mahon as “Less a translation than an adaptation. Less an adaptation, in fact, than an original poem of considerable power.”
Landing Light: Poems
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver…
—from “Waking with Russell”Hailed for its “enormous skill and verve” (The Guardian) and its “seriousness and moral urgency” (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years. Ceaselessly inquiring, Don Paterson discovers the love of a son, a talking book, the voices of a wreckage left in the black box. In traditional forms, short lyrics, and long narratives, Paterson has crafted—with precision and passion—his most accomplished and spiritual collection.
The Ice Age: A Collection of Poems
The new collection from one of the best new talents in contemporary poetry Paul Farley’s debut collection: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You was one of the most highly acclaimed in recent years. It won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection;a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 1999 he was named as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection was described as ‘a stunning debut’ by the Sunday Times.
The Ice Age sees Farley extend his range to embrace a new and philosophical seriousness. His gift is to uncover the evidence so often overlooked by less attentive observers, finding—in childhood games, dental records and dog-eared field guides—those details by which we are proven and elegised. Formally deft and dizzying in its variety, The Ice Age will consolidate Farley’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and enduring poets to have emerged in recent years.
Selima Hill’s Bunny is set in the haunted house of adolescence. Always blackly comic, sometimes beguilingly erotic, each echoing poem opens a door on madness or menace, shame or blame. Bunny tells the intimate story of a young girl growing up in London in the 1950s, confused and betrayed but finding herself, becoming independent.
Appearances are always deceptive. That predatory lodger. The animals outside and within. The girl sectioned in the hospital, nursing her sense of wrong. The blueness of things. The fire.
What the house contains, it cannot hide. The poems reveal not only what was papered over but what she learned. About how to be a woman. How to be loved. And what happens to innocence.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating. In his new translation, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is both true, line by line, to the original poem and a fundamental expression of his own creative gift.- Works 1–10 of 69
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